Most arguments for government intervention put the cart before the horse. They begin by asking whether a restriction might be useful rather than whether anyone has the right to impose it.

Liberty should be the default, and government intervention the exception. The classical liberal ideal of the presumption of liberty puts the burden of justification on those who would restrict freedom, not on those who wish to exercise it. The presumption of liberty rests on the moral equality of individuals. No person is naturally entitled to rule another; therefore, restrictions on peaceful action require justification.

A useful way to understand the presumption of liberty is through the more familiar presumption of innocence. In criminal law, the accused does not have to prove that they deserve to remain free. The state must prove that it is justified in punishing them.

The presumption of liberty extends a similar principle beyond the courtroom. People should be free to act unless there is sufficient justification for restricting them. The burden of justification rests on those who would interfere with individual liberty. The presumption of liberty does not mean people may do whatever they please regardless of the impact on others. It is a presumption in favor of people doing what they please with their own lives, consistent with everyone else’s equal freedom to do the same.

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Medicaid is one of the largest and fastest-growing items in the federal budget and is highly vulnerable to waste, fraud, and abuse.

We took that problem to Capitol Hill, hosting a panel featuring Michael F. Cannon of the Cato Institute, Chris Pope of the Manhattan Institute, and Brian Blase of the Paragon Health Institute to discuss Medicaid’s structural weaknesses and how to address them.

No new parent looks at their baby and thinks, “I want my child to be standardized.” Cars, furniture, hardware parts, sure. But not our kids. Yet for more than a century, most kids have been educated in a factory-model school system geared toward standardization. In an effort to educate the masses, earlier generations traded the individualized nature of homeschooling and the one-room schoolhouse for an approach that sorted kids by birth date instead of ability or need and delivered content to the whole group at the same speed, whether or not it was the right content or speed. 

The expansion of educational freedom is helping fuel a movement back to a more individualized approach to learning. School choice programs, such as education savings accounts, allow parents to direct a portion of state funding to a variety of educational options. At the same time, some states are working to reduce barriers that make it difficult to create these new entities.

Much has changed for crypto in Washington since the current Trump administration took office. The enforcement campaign against the major exchanges has wound down; rulemaking has begun to replace litigation as the instrument of policy; and Congress has at last supplied rules for stablecoins. What has not changed is that market structure remains unfinished business, so most improvements rest on the goodwill of regulators rather than on the force of law. The Senate has never come closer to finishing the job than it has this year.

Market structure is the shorthand for a market’s basic legal architecture, meaning the rules that settle which body of law governs a given instrument and who supervises the firms that trade it. Supplying one for crypto is the bulk of what the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act would do. The bill would fix what a digital asset is in the eyes of the law and whether it is subject to the jurisdiction of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) or the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). This matters because a security carries registration and disclosure duties that a commodity does not.

More than eight years after President Trump dusted off Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 to tax US imports of steel and aluminum, no one should be surprised to hear that the president has stretched the meaning of “national security” in the statute (or lack thereof) to impose tariffs on a widening array of products of dubious national security relevance. Since March 2018, the Trump administration has extended the steel and aluminum duties to cover a vast array of steel and aluminum “derivatives” (i.e., products made using these metals) and imposed additional “national security” tariffs on imports of automobiles and auto parts; copper and copper derivatives; timber, lumber, and their derivatives; medium- and heavy-duty trucks, parts thereof, and buses; semiconductors; and pharmaceuticals. (Additional “national security” tariffs on polysilicon and its derivatives are set to go into effect on December 4.) 

Yet, perhaps more concerning than this headline expansion in “national security” protectionism is the administration’s move to extend the Section 232 tariffs to cover products that the average American would struggle to connect to the nation’s defense imperatives. For instance, the administration deems refrigerators, washing machines, and air-conditioning (AC) units to be steel derivatives and kitchen cabinets, sofas, and couches to be timber/​lumber derivatives, thus levying a 25 percent tariff on imports of these products. Table 1 lists these and other ridiculous examples of nondefense-related products subject to (or soon to be subject to) Section 232 tariffs. Under the guise of protecting and reinvigorating manufacturing industries whose output includes defense and critical infrastructure–related products, the administration is taxing everyday items, even if the mere suggestion that such products pose a threat to the nation’s safety is ludicrous.

Should the government jail people for putting on a drag show or eating a pot brownie? Bill Glod says no. Criticizing “legal moralism” in a July 29 essay for Lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org, Glod rejected enacting laws based on “controversial conceptions of the good … that not all people have good reason to endorse.” Less than a week later, Andrew T. Walker published a Daily Wire piece taking, in effect, the opposite position and attacking “drag queen conservatism.” These are recent rounds in a years-long fight on the political right about “postliberalism.” 

Both equate the government taking a moral side with coercion. They’re missing a key distinction offered by the medieval theologian St. Thomas Aquinas—a likely inspiration for Walker and a boogeyman for Glod. For Aquinas, as for Walker, the law exists to further the common good. But Aquinas believed, as Glod, that the law should leave most private vice unpunished.

In the seventh major solar trade action under the fourth legal authority in 15 years, the Trump administration has announced Section 232 “national security” tariffs and price floors for polysilicon and its downstream “derivatives,” including solar panels (modules) and the cells that go into them. It is the latest entry in the unfortunate and unsurprising saga of US solar protectionism, which has now spanned two decades with little to show for it.

Let’s recap:

• Following the failure of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act’s solar subsidies to boost the American solar industry, the Coalition for American Solar Manufacturing successfully petitioned the government in 2011 for anti-dumping and countervailing duties (AD/​CVDs) on Chinese solar imports, which initially ranged from 23.75 to 254.66 percent.

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